Mac developers animated by Core Animation demo

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 June 2007 13:12

Business IT - Technology

Core Animation - an API simplifying the creation of sophisticated animated user interfaces for Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' applications - received a warm welcome at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference today.

"It's very, very simple to use, very easy to add tremendous high production value to your applications," Jobs told the audience of more than 5000 developers.

To show off Core Animation's potential, Jobs used a demo application styled after the 'video wall' movie that plays on Apple TVs, but giving the user the ability to zoom in on a particular movie or search for videos according to their tags.

"This was written very, very quickly, and you can see what Core Animation can do for you," said Jobs. "It shows what you can do with a little bit of effort and Core Animation."

Rather than handling animations on a frame-by-frame basis, Core Animation allows developers to specify start, end and any intermediate keyframes for the various elements. It applies the required effects to each layer, then composites and renders them in real time.

Core Animation is compatible with any Mac capable of running Core Image (ie, most systems shipped in the last two years), and takes advantage of GPU acceleration and multi-core Intel CPUs, Apple officials said.